Disability Pride: an introduction

This depicts the disability pride flag. A black flack with 4 zigzags across the flag in blue, yellow, white, red and then green. — The disability pride flag

Did you know that July is Disability Pride month? To be honest with you, I didn’t know for a long time. In fact, I only discovered it last year, and really only engaged with it this year. But what is Disability Pride? And what is there to be proud about when you are disabled? These questions have so many answers, about which I am only beginning to learn and discover. To summarise it briefly, Disability Pride is about disability visibility, celebration of ourselves, and reclaiming the word, and the history associated with disability. It is about empowering disabled people, and helping us to fight for justice. This month, in order to celebrate my disability, I intend to do a series of blog posts about Disability Pride.

The origins of Disability Pride

Disability Pride is rooted in other pride movements such as Black Pride and LGBT pride, and came out of the growing disability rights movement in the US, originating under the name ‘crip power’. The first Disability Pride parade was in Boston, US, in 1990. Since then it has spread to many other countries. Writing and academia about crip power and Disability Pride have been growing in recent years. The Chicago Disability Pride organisers state their aims as:

to change the way people think about and define “disability”;
to break down and end the internalized shame among people with disabilities; and
to promote the belief in society that disability is a natural and beautiful part of human diversity in which people living with disabilities can take pride.

And this is a good starting place from which to understand the point of Disability Pride.

Society disables us

Disability Pride is based on something known as the social model of disability. This is basically a framework that allows us to conceptualise the interactions between disability and society. The social model says that disabled people are disabled by society, not necessarily by their impairment.

A clear example to illustrate this is through using the example of a deaf person. It is not the fact that this person cannot hear that disables them; what disables them is that society is based on spoken word and not sign language, that the assumption is that everyone can hear, that most places don’t provide interpreters, etc. None of this is actually to do with not being able to hear, it is mostly about the way in which society is set up. What this tells us is that, in general, most of the problems that we face, as disabled people, come from living in a society built for the non-disabled.

This becomes a little more complex in the case of a chronic illness like chronic fatigue syndrome. But it still holds that a lot of the things that disable me are due to the fact that society doesn’t take my illness and needs into consideration. In a world that is completely accessible, it would not change the reality that I don’t have the energy to get out of bed, but it would make me significantly less disabled if the world was set up around me!

The social model of disability shows us that it is not the disabled person that is the problem, it is in fact a world set up against us that disables us. This brings forward the system of ableism that advantages non-disabled people throughout their life – starting as early as school! Disability Pride as a movement relies on this model and it shows us what we have to fight for. Without understanding the complex system of ableism, and the history of it, we cannot understand why we as a group are so excluded from the rest of the world. Disability Pride is about reclaiming our past, and reframing our future in a world where we are no longer disadvantaged by the fact that we are disabled.

Visibilising disability

Disabled people are the largest minority group, yet they are often the least seen. Disability spans such a huge number of people located all over the world, from every culture, class and background; there is also no single thing that defines someone as disabled. As such, it is difficult to create a disability movement. Alongside that, disabled people have historically been, and still are, hidden away from non-disabled people.

There is a long history, in many countries, of institutionalising disabled people in order to hide them from the rest of society. And if people were not institutionalised, they were often hidden away because they brought shame to the family, or worse, were killed for being disabled. In the US, they had something called the ‘Ugly laws’ from 1614 all the way through to the 1970s. This criminalised disabled people who appeared in public because it considered them a threat to social and economic life.

Whilst this is officially no longer a law, the way in which homeless people are invisibilised is directly related to it, especially given that, in the US, 40% of people who are homeless are disabled. This means, over time, it has been very clearly reinforced that disabled people should not be seen or heard.

Part of Disability Pride is visibilising disabled people: showing the world that we are here, we exist and we are not ashamed about that. In fact, quite the contrary, we are proud to be here. Attending a Disability Pride parade is so empowering because for once you are surrounded by people like you – you are not someone to be pitied, not someone to be stared at, but just a person celebrating your identity. The idea of Disability Pride is to remove the shame from being disabled and to show that we are a huge and important community. It is only through being loud, proud and present that we can build a disabled culture, unite ourselves as a movement, and show the world that we are not ashamed, and they should not be either.

Disabled people are inspirational or pitiable

The way in which disabled are often represented in mainstream culture depicts the disabled person as an object of pity, or an object of inspiration to the able-bodied person. The first means that disabled people are often shown as helpless, needy and having a low quality of life. This makes them seem like an object of pity, not an equal who has a lot to bring to the table, but someone for whom life is always sad and terrible, just because of their disability. This is not to say that having certain disabilities doesn’t suck… it does! I’d far rather not have chronic fatigue syndrome, but realistically I don’t feel like someone in need of pity. I have so much that I am happy about. We do not need to be distilled to our disability and told that we need pity and that our lives are terrible. Because often, this is just not true, and it objectifies us as humans, making our lives seem worthless.

Going hand in hand with this is what we, in the disability community, call “inspiration porn”. This is when videos of disabled people doing something (sometimes as mundane as doing up their shoe laces) is used by non-disabled people to motivate and inspire themselves. An example I’m sure we have all seen is a disabled person doing something amazing in a wheelchair and the caption says “if they can do thing x then you can get out of bed in the morning”. Another example is the standard caption about a disabled person overcoming their disability, or the video of a disabled person being taken on a date by a hero. I could go on because these examples are everywhere: “the only disability is a bad attitude”.

Inspiration porn, in all its forms, is so harmful to the image of disabled people. It not only suggests that disabled people are always inspiring and morally good, which isn’t true, but it also again infers that disabled people are inferior and less capable than non-disabled. As soon as a disabled person does any normal thing, people are quick to caption it with something that suggests that an able bodied person should be able to do this a thousand times better, the assumption being that disabled people are helpless and worthless. At the same time, these videos perpetuate the idea that we are unlovable and need a hero to save us. Take, for example, all the videos showing a non-disabled person loving a disabled person “despite” their illness. These depictions show disabled people in such a narrow, unrealistic and negative light and inevitably affect the self-image of people with disabilities – something which is incredibly annoying and bad for our mental health.

Equally, in many cultures, disability was historically, and in some cases is still now – publicly paraded around to be ridiculed, and cynically used to generate income, by shocking the public. Take the historical treatment of disabled people as circus exhibits, in freak shows and asylums, for example. In the UK, in 1681, London City governors lauded the financial success of the “greate quantity of persons that come daily to see the Lunatickes”. Similarly, in many cultures, the practice of beggars breaking their children’s limbs, in order for them to earn more “sympathy money” when begging is still prevalent today.

Disability Pride is about countering these narratives and celebrating disabled people and crip culture. We are reclaiming the word “disabled”; it is not a slur. I am not offended to be called disabled, because I am disabled, and it is not a bad thing. Disability Pride is letting disabled people be inspired by each other not “despite” their disability, but with it.

Disability Pride is about showing and creating a culture that we can call disability culture, or crip culture as others call it. There is so much to celebrate within the disabled community, and minimising it to inspiration porn or pity removes all of the colour and brightness from those with disabilities. I have attached a list at the bottom with links to some amazing things I have found within crip culture, such as Krip-hop nation, a disabled rapping duo, and the disabled circus in Bristol who reclaim the idea of the freak show.

The Disabled movement needs to be forefronted

Disability Pride is also, and very importantly, about forefronting the movement for disability justice. This includes the celebration, reclamation and visibilisation of disabled people. But it also means contextualising and centring the fight for disability justice.

Disability justice is more than just the fight for physical access to buildings. It is the fight against ableism. There are so many ways in which disabled people are disadvantaged in society, and forced into poverty, so a strong disabled movement, with allies (of whom there are pitiably few) is incredibly important.

Disabled people around the world are some of the poorest people, often being unable to work due their disability, having had a lower standard of education because school is set up for the non-disabled, or simply not employed because of prejudice. In countries where disability benefits exist they are shockingly low, and regularly under minimum wage, despite the fact that being disabled is very expensive. And often, when receiving disability benefits, you are not allowed to save any money in assets or otherwise, meaning people are forced into poverty and prevented from maintaining a buffer. Unsurprisingly, this means that many disabled people without a support system end up homeless. Poverty is a huge issue for disabled people.

Disabled people are also more vulnerable to violence. Take, as an example, police violence in the US. Of all the Black people who have been murdered by the police, around half of them have been disabled. This is rarely talked about but obviously makes being disabled even more dangerous as a Black person. Just some very obvious examples of why, the police often mistake sign language for gang signs, people with certain disabilities may move in a way that the police read as drunk or on some sort of drug, and they may misunderstand or just not see or hear police instructions. In fact, Elijah McClain, recently killed by the police, was initially considered “sketchy” because he was wearing a ski mask in the summer. He was wearing that mask to keep himself warm because he suffered from anaemia and was unable to stay warm. This detail is missed out of every report I’ve read on the matter except those of the disability community. The role of disability in police violence is very important, and the Disability Pride movement is important in fore fronting this.

Accessible housing for disabled people is another huge issue. Both because housing is often not built in a way that is physically accessible for disabled people, and also because housing is not affordable for disabled people. In fact, the list of things for which the disability justice movement is fighting goes on and on. Disability Pride is an important part of this movement because it builds a culture and a community of disabled people, and it also enables disabled people to physically claim space and very visibly demand the support that they need from the rest of the world. We empower each other and through that are stronger in fighting for what we need.

Educate yourself this Disability Pride

There are so many more things to talk about on these issues, that this article is really only the tip of the iceberg. Having only learned, very recently, about Disability Pride and crip culture, every day I discover a new thing. However, what I do know is that it is an incredibly important step towards empowering disabled people and helping us gather the strength to fight for everything that we still need. This month, I will be continuing to post about Disability Pride, and the new things that I learn. But I encourage everyone to both learn about the history of disability, and the current challenges faced by disabled people. I will leave a list of links to articles I have found important and also to disabled artists that I find awesome.

Mostly importantly, stay disabled and stay proud 🙂

Chronically Ill Kat